Morning Links: Pareidolia Edition

John Currin painted one of four different covers for the 125th-anniversary issue of Vogue, with his brush summoning the visage of Jennifer Lawrence. “To be in a situation of producing a cover for this famous magazine, I’m a little scared,” Mr. Currin told the New York Times. “I do worry about decorum.” [The New York Times]

“Objects are people too: the quirky world of facial pareidolia—in pictures.” Eyes and mouths are everywhere! (Pareidolia, noun: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.) [The Guardian]

Massachusetts

Here’s a good look into the story of the Berkshire Museum’s controversial plan to deaccession 40 works and sell at them at Sotheby’s in an auction estimated at $50 million. [PBS Art Beat]

“Mammoth doilies blanketing boulders and wafting in the leaves overhead” are among the riches in two museum exhibitions that come in for good reviews in Cape Cod. (One is at Highfield Hall and the other at Heritage Museums & Gardens.) [The Boston Globe]

Shows

Jason Farago went to the Windy City to see the Art Institute of Chicago’s retrospective of Paul Gaugin, a “resounding, rollickingly diverse exhibition” of an artist with no small amount of baggage to unpack. [The New York Times]

In Iceland, a photography show coheres around a title that does not mince words: “F*CK GENDER.” [The Reykjavik Grapevine]

Here’s a look into disused trolley tunnels in Washington, D.C., that have been turned into a literal underground art space under the name Dupont Underground. [The New York Times]

Write/Learn

Here’s a profile of art writer Taylor Renee Aldridge, who was named one of “20 people who are making Michigan a better place.” [Detroit Metro Times]

Kari Byron, an on-camera personality on TV’s MythBusters and The White Rabbit Project, advocates for art to be integrated with traditional STEM education devoted science, technology, engineering, and math—better to be known, in her estimation, as STEAM. [Popular Science]

Misc.

Taking 200,000 objects from the collection of the Met as its purview, Google has a “public dataset [that] is invaluable for anyone who wants to learn how to build a custom machine-learning model, create an app for sorting and visualizing the images, and more.” [Google]

Here’s some more background on dOGUMENTA, an exhibition for dogs opening tomorrow in New York. [Metro]